“For the unsentimentally cerebral Wittgenstein, a photograph is not a memorial, but a ‘probability’. The philosopher’s archive at the University of Cambridge includes the photograph above, a true ‘probability’ in that it does not represent any one person but is a composite image of his face and the faces of his three sisters, made in collaboration with the ‘founding father of eugenics,’ Francis Galton.” (Well, I don’t buy the latter, since Galton dies in 1911…) >full text (c) OPEN CULTURE, 2013
Following its traces in streets & galleries >full text (and more pics)
(c) wieninternational.at 2013
Thomas Bernhard, “the great Austrian author, created several curious characters in his short play The German Lunch Table. (…) When I first read the play, I wondered if it could be adapted for Indian stage, especially in the context of the Sikh pogrom in November 1984 in the days following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.” A contribution to the cultural memory debate re: political violence from a cross-cultural perspective. >full text & photo/s
(c) India Ink / NYT, 2013
A “beautiful corpse” from the Habsburg collection is on display in Vienna.
“A bicycle from Poland. Pieces of a Messerschmitt fighter plane from U.S. Air Force archives in Alabama. Camp log books from Caen. An embroidered handkerchief, tossed out a prison window by a woman on her way to execution for helping Allied paratroopers. A rusty watchtower searchlight, unearthed just last year. Wedding rings, watches & photos confiscated upon arrival here 1938-45.
On 5 May, two new permanent exhibitions were opened at Austria’s concentration camp memorial at Mauthausen along with a Room of Names – all part of an ongoing redesign scheduled for completion in 2018.”>full text (c) THE VIENNA REVIEW, 2013
“It was the greatest incidence of scientific persecution in American history.
In July of 1947, Dr Wilhelm Reich—a brilliant but troubled psychoanalyst who had once been Freud’s most promising student, who had enraged the Nazis and the Stalinists as well as the psychoanalytic, medical and scientific communities, who had survived two World Wars and fled to New York—was dying in a prison cell in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, accused by the government of being a medical fraud engaged in a ‘sex racket’.” >more (c) motherboard.com 2013
“Assessing the life of a philosopher may be a writer’s greatest challenge – with few individuals do the spiritual and emotional realms play such a prominent role in moulding professional consequences. With that in mind, author Ray Monk sets off on a very specific quest in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty of Genius – to draw, where countless others have failed, an unbroken line between the work of the philosopher and the man himself.” >review (c) VIENNA REVIEW, 2013
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, “the Austrian crown prince whose assassination triggered World War I, started a trip across the world in 1892. His newly published diary from the journey reveals a world of extremes, from island cannibals to skyscrapers.”>full text (c) SPIEGEL INT’L, 2013 Photo (c) DOROTHEUM, 2010
This exhibition at the Vienna MUQA “explores the phenomenon of inescapable recognizability in the media and the resulting strategies of media users to become virtually faceless.
FACELESS takes a radical look at this fairly recent phenomenon of everyday media culture and shows how it manifests in visual art, fashion, photography, advertising, and dance.”
4 July – 1 Sept >more
Picture: Lady Glittersky, 2009, C-print, 121x92cm
(c) Thorsten Brinkmann, VBK, Wien 2013 and VG Bildkunst Bonn 2012
Enjoy your Ulyssey: James Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom is probably the most closet Central European protagonist of Anglophone literature.
delirium clemens 